Advocate for our right to trial.

The U.S. positions itself as a just country with a superior legal system where people are always considered innocent until proven guilty and always granted the right to a trial before a jury of their peers. Except this isn’t true at all. Despite the promise of the Sixth Amendment, we do not have an effective right to trial because today, the overwhelming majority of cases will never see a judge.

Happy Thursday! Understanding abolition requires us to consider how our criminal justice system fails to live up to its expectations. Part of that is understanding how our right to trial is often convoluted. Today, Andrew unpacks more.

Thank you to everyone that makes this work possible. If you want to support, give $7/month on Patreon. Or you can give one-time on our website or PayPal. You can also support us by joining our curated digital community.

Nicole

TAKE ACTION

Read the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyer’s report on “The Trial Penalty” and learn about racism in the criminal justice system.
Follow the Prison Policy Initiative (Instagram), The Marshall Project, and Prison Legal News.
Learn about how even deplorable acts of harm require justice from outside the legal system. (TW: discussion of child sexual abuse throughout).
Support Decarcerate PA (Instagram), the Anti-Recidivism Coalition, the Center for Constitutional Rights, or a local group working to fight prosecution, incarceration, and dependence on the state for addressing harm.

GET EDUCATED

By Andrew Lee (he/him)

Some think that most criminal cases go to trial and that those who take a plea deal are always guilty. But in reality, only a third to a fourth off felony cases went to trial in the 1960s. Today, the figure is just one in twenty. 90% of the criminal convictions are the result of a plea deal, not a trial (The Outline). Most convictions happen after a defendant gives in to a prosecutor offering them a lighter sentence if they plead guilty or a much heavier sentence should they lose in court.

It’s not hard to imagine an innocent person who may have already spent months in jail deciding to take such a deal rather than risk a trial. This “trial penalty,” says the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, “has virtually eliminated the constitutional right to a fair trial” (NACDL). In the words of Judge Jed S. Rakoff, “Our criminal justice system is almost exclusively a system of plea bargaining, negotiated behind closed doors and with no judicial oversight. The outcome is very largely determined by the prosecutor alone” (The Marshall Project). Only 2% of those facing federal charges go to trial, and that percentage drops every year (Pew). We now have a system where prosecutors use plea deals to simply assign sentences to the disproportionately Black and Brown people kidnapped by the American state.

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world (Equal Justice Initiative) and incarcerates a greater number of people than any other country. One out of every four people incarcerated today are locked up in the United States, despite the fact that it has less than 5% of the global population (ACLU). The vast majority of those incarcerated are neither convicted nor sentenced by a judge or jury. The American criminal justice system is exceptional in many ways, but it is hard to imagine that such a system is exceptionally just.

Decrying the drop in cases taken to trial doesn’t mean we should go back in time. American justice wasn’t just when slavery was the law of the land. American justice wasn’t just in the Jim Crow era, when “Black Codes” and the convict leasing system returned thousands of Black people to effective slavery. It wasn’t just in the 1950s and 60s, when civil rights protestors were convicted as criminals (Equal Justice Initiative). It wasn’t just before 1963, when poor defendants had no right to an attorney (Britannica), or before 2003, when gay sex was illegal in more than a dozen states (Britannica). The American justice system has never provided justice for the masses of Black and Brown people, queer and gender non-conforming people, or poor people in general. That today almost nobody receives even the formality of a trial is but the latest egregious chapter in a long, enraging story.

People in every country on Earth, from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe, are taught that their country’s system is uniquely fair. Many Americans, despite all evidence, believe in the goodness of “our” system. Even after the uprisings of last summer, many seek minor reforms. If only we could modify the local police or change a few sentences of the legal code, the thinking goes, we could have the pure world of Law & Order episodes: intrepid cops who arrest the bad guy, a dashing prosecutor who uncovers incontrovertible proof, and a villain who tearfully confesses it all from the stand. The egregious reality of our court system suggests that we might instead look at limiting its power altogether. This means opposing incarceration, not only for drug or non-violent offenders but for everyone at all times (Prison Policy Initiative). This means opposing cages for people, whether they are in private prisons or prisons and jails run by the state. This means looking for transformation and justice within oppressed communities instead of demanding that prosecutors throw the book at alleged law-breakers (Teen Vogue).

Recognizing the lack of an effective right to a trial is one place to start.

Key Takeaways

Almost none of those charged with a crime go to trial. Instead, defendants are pressured into accepting plea deals.
In most cases, guilt isn’t established by a judge or jury. Instead, prosecutors are free to set sentences for suspects who plead guilty.
This means the right to a trial has effectively been written out of the U.S. criminal justice system.

10/29/2020 | Fight racist death row sentencing.

8/26/2020 | Be an active bystander.

PLEDGE YOUR SUPPORT

Thank you for all your financial contributions! If you haven't already, consider making a monthly donation to this work. These funds will help me operationalize this work for greatest impact.

Subscribe on Patreon | Give one-time on PayPal | Venmo @nicoleacardoza

Nicole Cardoza 5/21/21 Nicole Cardoza 5/21/21

Understand whiteness.

But race is a social construct, and social constructs have social histories. Our modern understanding of race was created at a specific historical juncture in colonial Virginia. Prior to that, it did not exist.

It's Friday! Welcome back to the Anti-Racism Daily. Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of "Between the World and Me," says that "race is the child of racism, not the father." Put simply, racism created the social construct of race that perpetuates racial bias and discrimination to this date. Andrew shares a bit more about the history of race in the U.S. and more resources to learn about the formation of whiteness.

Thank you to everyone that supports our independent publishing! If you can, consider giving $7/month on Patreon. Or you can give one-time on our website or PayPal. You can also support us by joining our curated digital community. I'm grateful for your support!

Nicole

TAKE ACTION

Learn about the social and historical construction of whiteness.
Educate yourself about the benefits of whiteness, provided by the National Musuem of African American History and Culture.
Take steps to disrupt and abolish race and whiteness.
Consider: How does being white grant certain privileges? How might white people experience oppression through other social identities, e.g., class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ability, etc.?

GET EDUCATED

By Andrew Lee (he/him)

There’s a general conception of racism that goes something like this: just as some people are naturally short or tall, we are all born into one race or another. Racism is unfair discrimination, but the racial categories themselves are natural and universal. Just as we might imagine someone in Shakespeare’s England or the 16th century Mali Empire being short or tall, we would imagine that person fitting into one of the modern U.S. census’s racial categories.

This doesn’t mean that everyone previously looked the same. If those subjects of the Mali Empire and Elizabethan England met, they would have recognized differences in skin pigmentation or eye color or any number of other things.

Similarly, I notice people’s heights. But I do not have a mental map that divides people into either The Talls or The Shorts. I do not think of The Talls and The Shorts as two different sorts of human beings. I do not immediately make a subconscious decision on whether someone I am talking to sight unseen is either A Tall or A Short person. And our society isn’t designed to universally provide one of these groups of people more power, privilege and opportunity than the other. This is an absurd example, but we all make instant judgments of this sort concerning race. Not necessarily because we are racist, but because race is a fundamental feature of social life in ways the fictitious Tall/Short division is not.

In colonial Virginia, landowners brought workers from England, Ireland, and countries across Africa to cultivate tobacco. These enslaved or forced laborers were poorly treated, and none had many rights, but African and European laborers were treated largely the same. African laborers able to acquire their freedom could exercise voting rights in the colonial legislature, accumulate wealth, and hire European laborers. People of African and European ancestry intermingled and intermarried without penalty and there is no evidence that they thought of themselves as members of two great camps of Black and white people (Understanding Race).

But after African and European servants joined forces in 1676’s Bacon’s Rebellion, the colonial legislature began passing laws to make such solidarity impossible in the future. The rights of African people were reduced until African descent was synonymous with slavery. On the other hand, a new category appeared: white. For the first time, people who might have been referred to as Christian, or English, or Scottish, or Swedish were all lumped together under this new name. Even the poorest white person now had greater rights than any enslaved African.

“What colony leaders were doing was establishing unequal groups and imposing different social meanings on them,” said Audrey Smedley. “As they were creating the institutional and behavioral aspects of slavery, the colonists were simultaneously structuring the ideological components of race” (Understanding Race).

Much later, when mass Irish immigration began in the 19th century, Irish people were not yet considered properly white. Racial stereotypes about Irish people abounded in popular media. For Anglo-Americans, the Irish were thought of as being much closer to Black people than to whites. Black people were even referred to as “smoked Irish.”

Irish Americans today are a nationality firmly within the universe of whiteness. What changed wasn’t any physical characteristic of Irish people but rather their political position within American white supremacy. Irish Americans largely rejected calls by nationalist leaders like Daniel O’Connell to join forces with Black people, instead of opposing abolition and acting “unabashedly American in the way they dealt with the slavery controversy” (Irish Times).

“Essentially what happened was the Irish became white,” said scholar Noel Ignatiev. “To the extent to which they could prove themselves worthy of being white Americans–that is, by joining in gleefully in the subjugation of Black people–they showed that they belonged… Having fair skin made the Irish eligible to be white, but it didn’t guarantee their admission. They had to earn it” (Z Magazine).

Whiteness is a social construct, but that doesn’t mean we can just wish it away. Police officers and Lutheranism and Thursdays are also social constructs, but we can’t snap our fingers and make any of them disappear, either. Your non-belief in police officers won’t help you when you get pulled over; if you choose to ignore Thursdays you’ll always have the wrong day of the week. To say something is a social construct implies it has not always existed and could exist otherwise or not at all. Nonetheless, there are practices, policies, and institutions that make social constructs real, powerful, and potentially deadly while they exist.

Ignatiev’s suggestion was to instead work collectively towards the abolition of whiteness, meaning the destruction of those privileges associated with being part of the “club” of whiteness. “The white race is like a private club based on one huge assumption: that all those who look white are, whatever their complaints or reservations, fundamentally loyal to the race. We want to dissolve the club, to explode it” (LA Times).

It is not just that some white people or institutions are racist but rather that the category of whiteness in the United States has always had racial oppression as its function. To “explode the club of whiteness” does not require self-pity and hand-wringing by self-proclaimed white allies. If the fundamental assumption of whiteness is that all white people–neighbors, bosses and employees, police officers and civilians, family members or strangers on the street–have some basic loyalty to each other, a more powerful response would be to break the color line, practicing disloyalty to whiteness in favor of loyalty to humanity.

Understand, unpack, and abolish whiteness.

Key Takeaways

We often think of racism as unjust discrimination between objective racial categories.
In fact, categories like “white” didn’t always exist. Whiteness was created as a legal category in colonial Virginia to prevent lower-class solidarity.
Racial categories have always been part of a racial hierarchy.
To interrupt racism, we need to disrupt whiteness, including white intra-racial solidarity at the expense of people of color.

RELATED ISSUES

3/19/2021 | Divest from whiteness.

12/21/2020 | Have tough conversations.

10/9/2020 | Learn about slavery and the White House.

PLEDGE YOUR SUPPORT

Nicole Cardoza 5/19/21 Nicole Cardoza 5/19/21

Recognize U.S.–sponsored brutality.

Israeli settlers are trying to evict Palestinian families from homes in the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. “Since 1967,” says Amnesty International, “it has been the policy of successive Israeli governments to promote the creation and expansion of Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories” (Amnesty International).

Happy Wednesday and welcome back! The ongoing crisis in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories has dominated the news cycle this week. Calls to acknowledge both sides often ignore the gross power imbalance at play, and the U.S.'s complicity in the violence. Today, Andrew outlines the role of the U.S. in the brutality.

Thank you to everyone that gives a little when they can to keep this newsletter going! If you can, consider giving $7/month on Patreon. Or you can give one-time on our website or PayPal. You can also support us by joining our curated digital community. This newsletter will continue to be a free resource because of this collective support.

Nicole

TAKE ACTION

Learn about the Israeli occupation, the Sheikh Jarrah expulsions, and Gaza airstrikes.
Understand the role the U.S. government plays in the oppression of the Palestinian people.
Support the Palestinian Youth Movement (Instagram), If Not Now (Instagram), and Free Gaza.

GET EDUCATED

By Andrew Lee (he/him)

Israel, like the United States, is a settler-colonial state, in which the inhabitants of a territory are killed or expelled by settlers who create their own society on the same land (Washington Report on Middle East Affairs). The foundation of the State of Israel saw the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian people.

In the last two decades, dozens of Palestinian families have been evicted from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood alone. But the current attempted expulsions led to a huge wave of Palestinian opposition.

Far-right Israelis chanted “death to Arabs” at counter-protests, and the Israeli military stormed Al Aqsa Mosque, beating and shooting sniper rounds at those inside (Al Jazeera). When groups in the Gaza Strip launched rockets at Israel, the Iron Dome missile defense system shot down 90% of them. “Israel is the vastly more powerful player,” says the BBC. “Its air force, armed drones and intelligence-gathering systems enable it to strike targets in Gaza pretty much at will” (BBC).

Israeli airstrikes are now leveling buildings in Gaza, an impoverished region mostly inhabited by descendants of Palestinians whose families were forced out by the new State of Israel after the 1948 Arab-Israel War. Many live in refugee camps to this day (History). The Gaza Strip has high unemployment, inadequate water and sewage, and suffers from Israeli sanctions that block imports of resources like food supplies (Britannica). At least three high-rise buildings were destroyed by airstrikes last Wednesday alone. “There is nowhere to run, there is nowhere to hide. That terror is indescribable,” said a pharmacist whose apartment building was obliterated (AP News).

Violence is, of course, deplorable in general. But those liberal politicians and celebrities who merely condemn such violence “on both sides” miss two crucial points.

First, Israel is a settler-colonial nation-state immeasurably more powerful than its opponents. It was the more powerful party which started the current cycle of violence by supporting the eviction of families from land it occupies by force. Those dispossessed and displaced are organized into several opposition groups, all with significantly less capacity to inflict military damage than the Israeli state.

Second, when American leaders condemn “both sides,” they make it seem as if the United States were a disinterested party. But the U.S. is firmly aligned politically with Israel. In fact, the U.S. is Israel’s chief benefactor, providing both weapons and with international cover for the occupation. A 2018 UN Security Council resolution denouncing Israeli killings of Palestinian civilians would have passed had the U.S. not been the one member to vote against it (Reuters). The U.S. gives Israel over $3 billion each year in weapons, weapons which today are detonating in the Gaza Strip (U.S. State Department). On Monday, the Biden administration approved $735 million in precision-guided weapon sales to Israel (Washington Post). The day before, an Israeli airstrike destroyed the building containing the office for the Associated Press as the death toll in Gaza climbed to 148 (MSN). That same day, the United States stood alone in blocking a United Nations resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire between all parties involved (MSN).

There are many reasons for the United States’ uniquely strong support of Israel. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which lobbies for near-unconditional American political and military support of the country, brags of being the most influential lobbying group in Washington (New Yorker). Some evangelical Christians cynically support Israel out of a belief that Jewish control of the Holy Land is necessary for Jesus Christ to return and initiate the literal end times from the Book of Revelation (Belief Net).

The strength of pro-Israel sentiment in the U.S. government and vigorous efforts by Israeli politicians to ensure continued U.S. support do not mean that Israel alone controls the United States’ every move, a false idea connected to anti-semitic paranoias about all-powerful Jewish conspiracies. The United States is a superpower. Israel, the size of New Jersey, depends on U.S. weapons sales and international support. Thanks to American military aid, Israel is the most heavily armed country in a region whose location and natural resources are important for U.S. state interests (Observer). Arming and defending Israeli apartheid allows the American government to exert influence in a region thousands of miles away. “Were there not an Israel,” Joe Biden said in 1986, “the United States would have to invent an Israel to protect its interests” (Politico).

According to Human Rights Watch, the Israeli government committed crimes against humanity even before the current attacks (Human Rights Watch). The political, economic, and military support offered by the United States makes the U.S. government an active agent in these crimes. The residents of the United States have exponentially more power to fight for an end to Israeli apartheid, displacement, and aggression than anyone else in the world. “The size of the global solidarity has angered the [Israeli] occupation government,” said Sheikh Jarrah activist Muna al-Kurd. “I believe in popular resistance” (Al Jazeera).

U.S. support for international oppression is nothing new. In 1973, the U.S. helped overthrow democratically-elected Chilean President Salvador Allende’s government and its replacement by an authoritarian “reign of terror” under Augusto Pinochet (NPR). During the Salvadoran Civil War, the U.S. gave military training and $4 billion in aid (Britannica) to a government that tortured and slaughtered civilians, including the entire population of a village called Mozote (Huff Post). Today, the U.S. provides “defensive support” to a Saudi-led war in Yemen that has created conditions the United Nations describes simply as “hell” (Vox) (United Nations).

It is a political and moral responsibility for us to ensure our atrocities aided and abetted by our very own government are put to an end.

Recognize and resist U.S.-sponsored brutality.

Key Takeaways

After attempting to evict Palestinians from occupied East Jerusalem, Israel began airstrikes against Gaza, flattening residential buildings and killing civilians.
Even before these attacks, Human Rights Watch declared that Israel was committing crimes against humanity.
Israel has many times the military power of its adversaries. 90% of rockets fired from Gaza were shot down by its missile defense system.
Israel depends on political, economic, and military support from the U.S., which provides $3 billion in weapons sales every year.

7/28/2020 | Denounce antisemitism.

PLEDGE YOUR SUPPORT

Nicole Cardoza 5/14/21 Nicole Cardoza 5/14/21

Support workers’ rights for educators.

Hate crime charges serve as a sentencing enhancement when someone acts with bias while committing a crime. This bias must be against members of a protected class – such as a specific race, religion, or sexual orientation – and it must be a motivating factor for the crime (Time). It seems reasonable that a crime is more odious if it occurs solely because the victim is a member of an oppressed community.

It's Friday! Welcome back to the newsletter. Yesterday, the CDC announced that fully vaccinated people can be indoors and outdoors in most places without a mask (NBC News). This news has prompted many industries to call for a full re-opening of businesses, including public school classrooms across the U.S. (Politico). Today, Andrew shares the perspective of educators – particularly those of color – and how we can support their wellbeing through this transition.

Thank you to everyone that gives a little when they can to keep this newsletter going! If you can, consider giving $7/month on Patreon. Or you can give one-time on our website or PayPal. You can also support us by joining our curated digital community. This newsletter will continue to be a free resource because of this collective support.

Nicole

ps – apologies for the incorrect takeaways yesterday! I'm still trying to get the hang of this new platform. They're correct on the web version of our archives.

TAKE ACTION

Support a progressive teachers’ union in your community, like the Philadelphia Caucus of Working Educators, for example.
Advocate for school reopenings alongside the wishes and interests of educators and students.
Educate yourself about the toll COVID-19 placed on teachers – and how retaining Black teachers will help Black students succeed.

GET EDUCATED

By Andrew Lee (he/him)

We’re a long way from the early days of the pandemic when the nurses, grocery store clerks, and pharmacists who kept society running were praised as heroes (Newsweek). Instead of celebrating essential workers, some now focus on punishing those workers “too lazy” to return to what are often menial, low-paying jobs (Jacobin).

Teachers fall into both categories. They’re celebrated and considered essential while at the same time scorned if they don’t want to return to dangerous work conditions. Educators can provide the next generation with the skills and knowledge they’ll need for the rest of their lives. Nearly all of us were raised in part by teachers. Those who have or plan to have children will see them spend a majority of their waking lives under the supervision of teachers. Almost everyone would agree that teachers are crucially important.

That sentiment is a far cry from actually supporting educators. In March, Los Angeles’ largest teachers union decried plans to reopen schools as “a recipe for propagating structural racism” (Politico). According to the United Teachers of Los Angeles, it was largely wealthy white parents who pushed for school reopenings. This put both education workers and working-class students of color at risk, given that poorer neighborhoods have much higher rates of COVID and school staff were not yet fully vaccinated.

Right before Philadelphia schools reopened, the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers’ Caucus of Working Educators shared photos of classrooms with mouse droppings and mold. This was despite previous assurances by the school district that schools were clean and ready for students (Chalkbeat). “We feel lied to and betrayed seeing the condition of our school,” said one educator. The rush to reopen clearly put both teachers and students at risk in a school district where most students are students of color (National Center for Education Statistics).

In May 2020, 7 out of 10 teachers reported their lower morale due to the pandemic, though at that point stay-at-home orders in most states were less than two months old (EdSurge). Now, teachers are even closer to the breaking point (NPR). One said the past year was harder than teaching in New York City after 9/11. Another, a Black teacher in Virginia, said that the combination of COVID and ongoing police murders have left her at “points of lowness [she] hadn’t experienced before.”

At the beginning of this school year, a quarter of teachers said they intended to leave before its end (Rand Corporation). And even before the pandemic, Black teachers in poor work environments were dramatically more likely to leave than their white coworkers (Chalkbeat).

Teachers are under pressure from parents and administrators alike. They were already dealing with poor salaries and working conditions, resulting in teachers–especially teachers of color–being squeezed out of the profession. This is an outrage for racial justice and a shameful way to treat educators, who are lauded in the abstract but ignored in real life.

Right-wing propaganda has long claimed that teachers' unions are bad for students and society writ large. And it’s true that there are bad teachers in teachers’ unions. There are bad bus drivers in bus driver unions and bad nurses unions and bad flight attendants in flight attendant unions because that’s how people are. Of course, we should vigorously oppose racist, queerphobic, and patriarchal behavior by those in positions of power in schools, just as we should struggle against their existence in any institution.

But at a time where teachers are pushed out of the field and schools are reopening in dangerous ways, groups of educators in progressive teachers unions are leading the fight for the wellbeing of their colleagues and students. Organized, progressive teachers are demanding safe, well-resourced classrooms and living wages for those who teach them. Supporting these struggles is how we ensure working-class students of color can succeed academically and educators of color can succeed professionally.

We need to support teachers’ rights.

Key Takeaways

The pandemic squeezed teachers to the breaking point.
25% of educators plan to leave their profession, and Black educators are leaving at higher rates than white ones.
Progressive teachers unions have led the fight to ensure school re-openings don’t put students at risk.

3/17/2021 | End standardized testing.

2/23/2021 | Rally against anti-trans legislation.

PLEDGE YOUR SUPPORT

Nicole Cardoza 5/13/21 Nicole Cardoza 5/13/21

Fight hate beyond hate crimes.

Happy Thursday! And welcome back to the newsletter. Although it's important we name how racism and discrimination influence violence against marginalized groups, hate crime legislation can disproportionately harm these same communities. Today, Andrew looks at the recent crimes designated as hate crimes and the disparities in sentencing.

TAKE ACTION

Learn more about what hate crime laws are and how they have actually been used against people of color.
Practice building community safety without policing and the Audre Lorde Project’s (Instagram) safety tips.
Read about why we should respond to anti-Asian violence with abolition, not hate crime legislation.

GET EDUCATED

By Andrew Lee (he/him)

In March, a white man walked into three Asian massage businesses and murdered eight people, six of them Asian women. All were identifiable as Asian-owned establishments. He entered each intending to take lives and admitted as much to police (NBC News). Immediately after the shooting, a Sheriff’s Deputy gave a press conference about the attack. He denied it was racially motivated, saying “yesterday was a really bad day” for the killer (MSN). It is almost impossible to imagine a police officer offering the same kindness to an Asian woman who shoots down six white people in their workplaces.

Understandably, many demanded that this vile act be labeled a hate crime, a common response after similar atrocities. Such killings were obviously motivated by hate, and we wish to see them acknowledged as such. But there are real reasons to be cautious of the rush to call things hate crimes, because when these practices become policy, they have an adverse impact on vulnerable communities of color.

Except this isn’t how the law is applied. A woman could be prosecuted for hate crimes against men. Queer people could be charged with hate crimes against straight people. In a landmark case, three Black teenagers had years added to their sentence because the courts held that their attack of a white teenager was a hate crime (Vice). Hate crime laws were used to sentence a member of the Black Liberation Army, a successor organization to the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, to death for supposed bias against white people (New York Times). According to hate crime laws, an organization fighting for Black liberation and a white supremacist mass shooter are one and the same.

In 2019, Black people accounted for 24% of hate crime convictions though they only make up 13% of the population. While white people make up 60% of the population, they only accounted for 53% of hate crime convictions (FBI). According to the criminal justice system, white people in fact commit disproportionately few hate crimes while Black people commit them at a disproportionately high rate. Since hate crimes are above all a legal category, it is not community members but a white supremacist system that decides when they exist.

We also need to remember that as sentencing enhancements, hate crime provisions increase the time someone is incarcerated or cause them to be legally executed. When we expand the prison system and increase its ability to kill, those who suffer first are not white bigots but rather Black and Brown working-class people.

In the Atlanta example, prosecutors finally decided to charge the shooter with a hate crime as well as domestic terrorism (Yahoo). Domestic terrorism laws are disproportionately used to over-police Black, Brown, and Muslim communities (Emgage Action). Supporting Muslim charities, loaning money to friends for airline tickets, and even going paintballing are all innocuous activities that have led to domestic terrorism charges (Jacobin). When we demand enhanced charges, we’re enabling an apparatus that overwhelmingly targets people of color. When we see racist murders go unpunished or armed white people storm the Capitol, it’s not absurd to think harsher penalties are what’s fair. But legitimizing the punitive system and enhancing its repressive abilities harms communities of color in the least equitable and most horrifying ways imaginable.

When we depend on the state for justice, we strengthen all of its parts: legislators and prisons, courts and police. If the American state, the wealthiest and most powerful one in the world, worked for racial justice, this newsletter would not be necessary. The protests of last summer would not have been necessary. Those protests were against the police and courts and prisons and politicians who enable them. The message of the revolts is that we cannot depend on the American government for racial justice, because the American government itself created and has profited from racial oppression for centuries. If we demand a stronger carceral system for that same system to protect us from hate, we throw all of those lessons aside.

We need to name racial violence without resorting to the language of a racist criminal justice system. We need to forcefully respond to it without depending on institutions that cause incredible harm to communities of color. We can confront racist bigotry without depending on racist institutions. If we support healthy, well-resourced communities that can defend themselves from racist attacks, we can build justice without promoting the forces that have denied it from so many for so long.

We need to fight hate. We can do it beyond appealing to hate crimes.

Key Takeaways

Demanding hate crime charges isn’t the only way we can resist racist violence.
Hate crime charges don’t make us free. They have been leveled against Black activists “biased” against white people and strengthen courts and prisons.
Black people are disproportionately convicted of hate crimes.
When we strengthen courts, police, and prisons, the people most directly affected are working class Black and Brown communities.
We can’t build true community safety by relying on a racist system.

4/13/2021 | Stop over-policing.

1/15/2021 | Mind the use of "terrorism".

PLEDGE YOUR SUPPORT

Nicole Cardoza 5/12/21 Nicole Cardoza 5/12/21

Reverse racist land grabs.

Good morning and happy Wednesday! Throughout history, communities of color have been forcibly removed from their native lands. But land disenfranchisement continues to this very day. Today, Andrew shares the history of racist land grabs and the importance of paying reparations.

TAKE ACTION

Follow Justice for Bruce’s Beach (Facebook) to learn about their ongoing campaign.
Learn about the history of sundown towns and Black land loss in the US.
Support Black Land and Power’s work to transform land ownership to support Black liberation at Reparations Summer.

GET EDUCATED

By Andrew Lee (he/him)

In April, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to make amends for a massive land grab rooted in white supremacy, though this remedy came almost a century too late (MSN). In the early twentieth century, Charles and Willa Bruce opened a Manhattan Beach resort that offered other Black families the opportunity to vacation under the Southern California sun. The white residents of Manhattan Beach were not pleased. The Bruce’s neighbors slashed their tires. The Ku Klux Klan set fire to the resort’s deck. These horrifying acts of white vigilantism weren’t what forced Charles and Willa to leave. In actuality, it was Manhattan Beach itself. The city government condemned the entire neighborhood around Bruce’s Beach. They then seized the resort through eminent domain. Though the city said that they did this to construct a park, this park never materialized. The Bruce family, forced from the city, was compensated only one-fifth of their asking price for the land they were forced to give up.

“This was such an injustice that was inflicted,” said LA County Supervisor Janice Hahn, “not just on Charles and Willa Bruce, but generations of their descendants” (Yahoo News).

This isn’t just the story of one bad town. We are often taught to think about racism in American housing as only a matter of federal policy, a peculiarity of Southern states before the Civil Rights movement, or a historical injustice whose wrongs have been set right. In reality, none of these things are true.

It was not just segregated states, but cities and towns across the country, that actively excluded Black, Chinese, or other people of color from white neighborhoods. Some allowed non-white people during the day but prohibited them from staying after dark. There were over 100 of these so-called “sundown towns” in the supposedly progressive state of California alone (Yahoo News).

And the legacy of racist housing practices lives on. For one thing, the historical robbery of properties like Bruce’s Beach deprives the descendants of the original owners of untold amounts of familial wealth. For another, the sundown towns of the past remain overwhelmingly white to this day. They’re no longer supposed to be able to exclude people of color by law. But in practice, the prevalence of anything from racial slurs (LA Times) to police harassment to private businesses’ refusal to serve Black customers serves the same purpose for these white enclaves.

The LA County Board of Supervisors endorsement of the return of the Bruces’ land is significant because it could open the door for other Black families’ reimbursement for the historic theft of their property as well. Community organizations recently pressured another California municipality, Glendale, to publicly apologize for its status as a former sundown town. The town of Norman, Oklahoma, did the same (News 9). Things might keep changing, but only if we support community organizations to keep up the fight.

The fight to return Bruce’s Beach to the family isn’t over. The California State Assembly will now need to pass additional legislation to approve the act. And this fight goes well beyond Manhattan Beach. The belated apologies of other former sundown towns may be meaningful, but they do not serve to compensate those whose ancestors were deprived the right to live within them. Racist housing policies in this country run so deep that the entire state of Oregon once functioned as one large sundown town, with a constitutional provision banning Black people from living or owning property within its borders. This language remained in the state constitution under 2002 (Ballotpedia). Given the way these historical injustices bleed into present-day inequities, Oregon scholar and activist Walidah Imarishi gave the reminder that, “If you believe in freedom, if you believe in justice, if you believe in liberation – now is the time to act” (OPB).

Malcolm X once said in a speech that “land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality” (Rev). Land is not only where we put family businesses; it is the stage of our entire lives. Land is the means by which we build safety and homefulness for our future and the futures of those who will come after us. These are all of the things which white supremacy and white people have stolen from people of color in the United States and it is well past time to right these wrongs.

We need to reverse racist land grabs.

Key Takeaways

Many American cities and towns excluded people of color through laws and intimidation.
The Bruce family is fighting for the return of land a California city once legally stole from their ancestors.
Land theft not only affected its victims but their present-day descendants who lost the familial wealth that land would have helped create.
People of color in the U.S. have been systemically denied access to the security and resources that the land provides.

RELATED ISSUES

4/14/2021 | Decommodify housing.

9/22/2020 | Learn about sundown towns.

7/20/2020 | Protect your community from the harm of gentrification.

PLEDGE YOUR SUPPORT

Nicole Cardoza 4/23/21 Nicole Cardoza 4/23/21

Learn how militarism supports racism.

The US is the top military spender on the planet. What’s more, it spends more on its military than the next ten countries–China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, the UK, Japan, South Korea, and Brazil–combined. The gargantuan military budget sponsors 800 American overseas military bases spread across more than 70 countries (Politico). In 2016, U.S. Special Operations Forces deployed to an astounding 138 countries. Given that there are only 195 countries on Earth, this means more than 70% were visited by American commandos (Forbes).

Happy Friday, and welcome back to the Anti-Racism Daily. Last week, the Biden administration announced it will withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, 2021 (Washington Post), which offers long-awaited reprieve for the troops and families who have dealt with decades of deployments. It would be remiss to discuss anti-racism from the lens of the United States without acknowledging how militarism fuels that racism both here and abroad. Today, Andrew shares his thoughts on warmongering and racial violence.

Our youth-led series on environmental justice launched last night! Don't miss out – subscribe to receive the week-long series in your inbox: thisisourho.me.

This newsletter is a free resource and that's made possible by our paying subscribers. Consider giving $7/month on Patreon. Or you can give one-time on our website or PayPal. You can also support us by joining our curated digital community. Thank you to all those that support!

Nicole

TAKE ACTION

Read about how American racism and militarism support each other.
Learn how radical Asian American newspaper Gidra analyzed “looking like the enemy” during the Vietnam War.
Follow anti-war organizations Dissenters (@wearedissenters), the United National Antiwar Coalition (@UNAC1), CODEPINK (@codepink), and Veterans for Peace (@VFPNational).

GET EDUCATED

By Andrew Lee (he/him)

Each year, the majority of the federal government’s discretionary budget goes to paying for the same single thing. It isn’t health care or housing. It isn’t education or transportation. No, each year hundreds of billions of dollars go to the US military (National Priorities Project).

In my lifetime alone, this sprawling, expensive military apparatus invaded Haiti, Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq (twice). It intervened in Kosovo, Somalia, Bosnia, and Syria (Infoplease). There’s no reason to think this will change anytime soon. President Biden is already signalling a “tougher” foreign policy, calling Chinese president Xi Jinping a “thug” and refusing to lift sanctions on Iran (MarketWatch). Half of Americans expect to go to war with Iran in coming years (Reuters) though less than one in four can point to it on a map (Newsweek).

We should oppose US military interventions on anti-racist grounds because they lead to the mass death and deprivation of people of color abroad. The War on Terror has killed hundreds of thousands of civilians directly (Watson Institute), to say nothing of those who died from environmental degradation and starvation in the wake of American attacks. The aftermath of the US invasion of Libya has seen the introduction of literal slave markets in the country (Time). No consistent anti-racist can endorse outcomes like these.

There’s an additional reason why opposing racism means opposing militarism. When America’s leaders beat the war drum, they put people of color in the United States at risk as well.

The day after September 11th, 2001, President Bush announced that the attacks were “more than acts of terror. They were acts of war.” The United States, he said, was engaged in a “monumental struggle of good versus evil” against an “enemy [who] hides in the shadows and has no regard for human life” (BBC). Three days later, a man with stated intentions to “go out and shoot some towel heads” murdered a Sikh gas station owner, erroneously believed him to be Muslim (PRI). The murderer told police he did it out of patriotic duty. That year, 2001, anti-Muslim hate crimes jumped by 1718% (PRI).

In the early 1980s, Vietnamese refugees along the Gulf Coast came under attack by the Texas Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Burning crosses appeared in the front yards of Vietnamese families as their homes and shrimping boats went up in flames (NPR). Some of the Klan’s members were veterans who saw their campaign of racial terrorism as a continuation of the Vietnam War in which they had fought. “I promise them a lot better fight here than they got from the Viet Cong,” said the Klan’s leader (Timeline). For these white paramilitaries, their enemy hadn’t just been the North Vietnamese army but rather Vietnamese people in general.

And the current wave of anti-Asian attacks follows years of escalating rhetoric against China. According to one Forbes article, China is poised to “take over the world” (Forbes). China “ripped off the United States like no one has ever done before,” according to President Trump, and pushed the World Health Organization to “mislead the world” over the “Wuhan virus” (CNN). One 2020 Trump campaign email read, “America is under attack -– not just by an invisible virus, but by the Chinese” (NY Times).

To justify, fund, and conscript soldiers for war requires framing an entire people as the enemy. Politicians sometimes clarify that it is only the political leadership or a certain group within a nation that’s worthy of elimination. But this is fine print in the campaign of racially-tinted dehumanization necessary to convince a nation to endorse mass slaughter. As Dale Minami puts it, “Those images remain. The antipathy remains and survives. And to dehumanize these people of color and bring that back to your own country, the United States, leads to a justification for just terrible treatment of Asian people” (NPR).

President Biden called for increasing the defense budget from $740 to $753 billion this year (The Hill), with the $13 billion addition supposedly only a “modest” increase. Biden’s first military act as president was sanctioning an airstrike in Syria that the administration described as a “deliberate” move designed to “de-escalate the overall situation.” A Notre Dame Law School professor, in contrast, called the attack a clear violation of international law (The Guardian).

“Deliberate” executions from the sky and Special Forces roaming across a majority of countries in the world aren’t anything unusual. Biden’s airstrike barely made the nightly news in the United States. But if US foreign policy should take an even more contentious turn in the near future, we would do well to remember the catastrophic effects of American war for people around the world and in our very own communities, too. Dehumanization, othering, and racial violence–at home as well as abroad–all go hand in hand.

We need to stand against warmongering.

Key Takeaways

The US military operates in most countries around the world. Its budget dwarfs that of any other nation.
American wars have devastating civilian consequences, largely falling on people of color in poor countries.
Building support for these wars involves demonizing and dehumanizing the targets of US intervention.
This dehumanization creates the climate for racial attacks against people of color in the United States.

PLEDGE YOUR SUPPORT

Nicole Cardoza 4/19/21 Nicole Cardoza 4/19/21

Go beyond allyship.

The uprisings of last summer against police murder and anti-Blackness led to quite a few folks loudly proclaiming themselves allies. You can buy a digital print-at-home poster declaring “I am an ally” over a clenched Black fist (Etsy) or a shirt with a similar fist and the word “ally” in capital letters underneath (Etsy). You can write an article expounding on all of your social positionalities and personal privileges, announce that you take yourself seriously as an ally, and close the piece with the sentence “let’s promise to listen” (HuffPost).

Happy Tuesday and welcome back to the Anti-Racism Daily. Many people feel spurred into action because of the series of violent events from the past two weeks. Today, Andrew shares more about the importance of solidarity, not allyship, as we collectively commit to reimagine the world we live in.

Our Earth Week series, "This is our home," starts Thursday, April 22. Subscribe to learn from youth environmental justice leaders addressing the biggest climate threats of our time. thisisourho.me.

This newsletter is a free resource and that's made possible by our paying subscribers. Consider giving $7/month on our website or Patreon. Or you can give one-time on our website or PayPal. You can also support us by joining our curated digital community. Thank you to all those that support!

Nicole

TAKE ACTION

Read “Accomplices Not Allies: Abolishing the Ally Industrial Complex.”
Educate yourself about how the category of whiteness was through the practice of colonialism and slavery.
Learn about the limits of allyship in fighting racism and settler-colonialism.
Support Black-led groups organizing for Black liberation.
Deepen your commitment to learn about and contribute to struggles for liberation.

GET EDUCATED

By Andrew Lee (he/him)

In her piece on white feminism, Nicole wrote of the need for “white women [to] decenter their own narrative and elevate others instead” (Anti-Racism Daily). Some of the language around allyship does the opposite: instead of highlighting the voices and needs of those most impacted by racism, sexism, or queerphobia, it singles out white, male, or straight and cis allies for praise and adulation. Self-centered allyship in the struggle for racial justice can veer dangerously close to white saviorism (MSN). They can divert radical movements into “a self-help book for white people” as more attention is paid to processing white guilt than stopping Black death (Wear Your Voice).

Another problem with centering allyship is that self-declared allies get to decide what allyship entails and whether to engage in it. Support for Black Lives Matter crested before the shooting of Jacob Blake last August as people and brands rushed to announce their status as allies publicly. After that, white support for the movement “grew soft, like a rotting spot on a piece of fruit” (New York Times). For a moment, allyship was in fashion. When the moment passed, many of those allies slunk back to the sidelines.

To center and celebrate allies as exceptionally interesting and virtuous often goes hand-in-hand with the belief that the alternative to allyship is neutrality. We might think that white supporters of Black Lives Matter are especially noble because their other white peers are instead neutral bystanders.

Indigenous Action forcefully critiqued this understanding in their influential zine “Accomplices Not Allies: Abolishing the Ally Industrial Complex” (Indigenous Action). Being an ally to indigenous people, they wrote, has become “currency,” “an identity, disembodied from any real mutual understanding of support,” a term “rendered ineffective and meaningless.”

To move beyond allyship means recognizing that the starting point isn’t neutrality. Citizens actively, materially benefit from anti-immigrant policies. Non-Black people benefit from anti-Blackness. The starting point for settlers is benefitting from settler-colonialism. As the zine puts it, non-indigenous people need to begin “to articulate your relationship to Indigenous Peoples whose lands you are occupying.”

If the starting position is not neutrality but complicity, we’re called to do more than declare ourselves allies, change our Twitter bios, or buy social justice ally wall art. Whereas allies center themselves, “accomplices are realized through mutual consent and build trust. They don’t just have our backs; they are at our side, or in their own spaces confronting and unsettling colonialism.” This isn’t just a semantic difference. It’s a different way to think about and practice solidarity: through centering those most directly affected and joining in the struggle, through direct action and confrontation, to dismantle systems that oppress them even as they benefit us.

An accomplice is, of course, someone who aids another in committing a crime as defined by the criminal justice system. As Code Pink puts it, “liberation requires being accomplices in resisting the legitimized forces of social control” (Code Pink). There are many roles that people can take to support social movements, from being at the front lines in the street to doing jail support or media work or a thousand other things. But self-identified allies should remember that dozens of people have already been arrested in Minneapolis following the police murder of Daunte Wright (ABC). Those people, many of them people of color, put their bodies, their freedom, and their lives on the line. Some may face legal repercussions for years to come because of these arrests. The way to honor that struggle isn’t by taking the easy way but deepening our commitments to listen, o learn, and to fight to uproot a system that kills and oppresses some while enriching and protecting others. In the words of Angela Davis, “When one commits oneself to the struggle, it must be for a lifetime” (American Public Media).

It’s time to go beyond allyship.

Key Takeaways

We should shift attention from the struggle against oppression to the virtues or guilt of allies.
Those who choose not to be allies aren’t neutral bystanders but rather beneficiaries of systems of oppression.
Benefitting from oppression calls us to engage deeply with communities in struggle and realize that we are personally implicated in the destruction of unjust systems.
To be an accomplice is to listen, learn, and take personal risks in the fight to dismantle systems of social control and racial injustice.

10/4/2020 | Don't blame the pipeline.

7/9/2020 | Acknowledge the harm of microaggressions.

PLEDGE YOUR SUPPORT

Nicole Cardoza 4/14/21 Nicole Cardoza 4/14/21

Decommodify housing.

Just because we’re all affected by the pandemic doesn’t mean that we’ve all been affected equally. Women accounted for all 140,000 jobs cut last December. Black and Latina women in particular lost jobs, since employment for white women actually rose that month (CNN). The data is clear: Black and Latina women were the worst-impacted by layoffs, white men the least (Bloomberg).

Happy Thursday and welcome back! Although the economy is improving as more people become vaccinated, more than 8 million American households are still behind on their rent (NPR). Housing is a human right, but access isn't distributed evenly. Today, Andrew outlines more about the housing crisis and efforts to keep people housed.

Are you under the age of 18? We want to hear from you. Take a moment to complete our anonymous survey on climate change.

This newsletter is a free resource and that's made possible by our paying subscribers. Consider giving $7/month on our website or Patreon. Or you can give one-time on our website or PayPal. You can also support us by joining our curated digital community. Thank you to all those that support!

Nicole

TAKE ACTION

Learn about racism in housing and how housing impacts the racial wealth gap.
Follow and support your local tenants union or community land trust.
Read about how tenant organizing is keeping renters in their homes.
Look into a community effort that stopped the eviction of a Black and indigenous family in Portland, OR.
Those fortunate enough to own property can donate it to a local land trust to ensure it remains affordable housing in perpetuity.

GET EDUCATED

By Andrew Lee (he/him)

This inequality comes as the COVID recession takes a serious toll on renters and homeowners alike. In January, almost one in five tenants was behind on rent, with an average outstanding debt of $5,600 (CNBC). In 2020, 2 million households fell at least three months behind on their mortgage payments (Consumer Finance Protection Bureau). The nation’s renters are estimated to owe some $5 billion more than all the rental assistance in the American Rescue Plan and December stimulus combined (CNN).

This is important because housing inequality has long been a key way that American racial inequality reproduces itself. Before the 1968 Housing Rights Act, some white neighborhoods used racial covenants to legally exclude tenants or homeowners of color (Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project). The historic refusal of banks to extend credit to “redlined” minority neighborhoods is estimated to have cost Black families $212,000 in wealth (CBS).

These inequalities aren’t a thing of the past. The average white family in America has ten times the wealth of the average Black family. It’s a gap that’s larger today than it was at the beginning of the twentieth century (Brookings). The single largest contributing factor to household wealth? The value of housing (US Census).

Even before COVID, Black homeownership was declining in cities across the country (Urban Institute) and predominantly Black, brown, and immigrant communities were being gentrified out of competitive housing markets (Teen Vogue). Now, these communities with less wealth and housing equity face higher risks from recession lay-offs. As current eviction moratoriums expire, the expected wave of foreclosures and evictions could exacerbate existing racial and gender inequalities to a catastrophic degree.

There’s a chicken-and-the-egg problem here: if all housing is sold or rented to the higher buyer, those with less wealth could always have their home taken away. At the same time, this housing insecurity itself inhibits the creation of familial wealth, since homeownership (or housing stability) is one of the biggest ways families build wealth for the future.

Fortunately, community organizations across the country are working out a solution: decommodifying housing. To stop thinking of housing as a commodity means to stop thinking of houses or apartments primarily as things to be bought and sold and instead as, above all, homes.

One way to ensure homes are used for housing people ahead of generating profit is by supporting tenants unions. Renters facing unjust evictions or unacceptable living conditions can band together to push landlords to do the right thing. When disrepair at the Villas del Paseo apartment complex in Houston led to black mold, cockroaches, and weeks without running water, tenants organized and withheld rent payments to force their property management company to fix the problems (Texas Observer). Organizing collectively builds the power of those most likely to be exploited by landlords: low-income people of color (Tenants Together).

Another approach is decommodifying housing is by removing the land for housing from the private market altogether through community land trusts, or CLTs. Community land trusts are nonprofits that collectively own the land underneath residents’ homes. These residents can buy, sell, and build equity in their properties, but the CLT retains the title to the land (Center for Community Land Trust Innovation).

Because the land underneath dwellings remains in the land trust even as buildings are bought or sold, housing prices are insulated from real estate speculation, even in expensive housing markets. And all of the residents who live on CLT land are represented in the nonprofit’s board of directors, ensuring the land is stewarded democratically. In this way, CLTs ensure that community-controlled affordable housing can remain affordable in perpetuity (Oakland Community Land Trust).

Community land trusts now exist across the country (Schumacher Center). But they were first started in Georgia by members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committees to ensure Black tenant farmers wouldn’t be displaced from their land for participation in the civil rights movement (NPR). This history should remind us of the deep connection between racial and housing justice movements, a connection necessitated by long-standing racial inequities in access to secure housing.

As COVID has deepened many of these same inequalities, it’s time to take action to decommodify housing.

PLEDGE YOUR SUPPORT

Nicole Cardoza 4/7/21 Nicole Cardoza 4/7/21

Forget what you know about MSG.

As a former waiter in an Asian restaurant, I know very well how many people claim to be sensitive to monosodium glutamate or MSG. Customers would demand that their meal be MSG-free to avoid the headaches or nausea or weakness they swore they would suffer afterward (Mayo Clinic). Often, they informed me of their MSG-adverse status in the same way they might disclose a life-threatening allergy: not as a preference but as a serious, permanent condition with dire consequences. The MSG-avoidant are real and numerous and often quite militant. I have seen them and served them noodles.

Happy Wednesday! And welcome back. The stigma surrounding MSG is part of the broader anti-Asian sentiment that's been carefully cultivated in the U.S. In order for us to dismantle it, we have to take it apart and analyze all the cogs and wheels that have kept it running. That's why I appreciate today's analysis from Andrew.

Yesterday's newsletter seemed to resonate with many of our readers. I just learned about Rachel Cargle's lecture called "Unpacking White Feminism" which is well-worth watching, along with EVERY educational resource she offers. Also, the posts I referenced were removed from Instagram after I scheduled yesterday's email. I think the content still offers much to learn from.

This newsletter is a free resource and that's made possible by our paying subscribers. Consider giving $7/month on our website or Patreon. Or you can give one-time on our website or PayPal. You can also support us by joining our curated digital community. Thank you to all those that support!

Nicole

TAKE ACTION

Read about the history of anti-Asian prejudice and violence in the United States.
Look at the “Know MSG” campaign, which aims to demystify and debunk myths about the common seasoning.
Buy or download “Chinese Protest Recipes” to learn Chinese recipes including some using MSG. All proceeds benefit Color for Change.
Inform yourself about the impact of racism on Asian restaurants during COVID.
Learn about the large variety of non-Asian foods that contain MSG.

GET EDUCATED

By Andrew Lee (he/him)

This isn’t just anecdotal evidence. According to one industry group, four out of ten Americans avoid MSG (Washington Post). That means more people stay away from MSG than caffeine, gluten, or GMOs. The cluster of symptoms afflicting the MSG-sensitive is so well-known that its name is even enshrined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary: “Chinese restaurant syndrome” (CNN).

I’m generally against sweeping statements about what foods other people should or should not ingest. If you’d like to only eat a paleo diet, or Cool Ranch Doritos, or foods starting with a certain letter depending on what day it is (MSN), that’s really none of my business.

With all that being said: if you think you suffer from “Chinese restaurant syndrome,” your actual ailment might be inadvertent racism.

MSG critics largely cite one single study contesting its safety. In this experiment, scientists injected mice with incredibly high doses of MSG soon after birth and found they grew up with health problems (Men’s Health). There are a number of common food ingredients that might be harmful when injected into baby mice, but that doesn’t mean they’re unhealthy for people to eat. Aside from the newborn mouse injection study, almost all the evidence for MSG’s terrible side effects comes from decades of personal reports.

The problem is that “Chinese restaurant syndrome” is only ever reported after eating Chinese food. Nobody gets it from tomatoes or Campbell’s chicken noodle soup or KFC. Sufferers of “Chinese restaurant syndrome” aren’t stricken after eating mayonnaise or potato chips or cheese or beef jerky.

All of the foods just listed contain MSG (Healthline). MSG is chemically indistinguishable from glutamate (FDA), a common amino acid found in almost every living being on the planet. If you feel tired and nauseated after eating a bite of Chinese food but not after eating a few Doritos, the culprit isn’t MSG. If you spend life avoiding Asian immigrant-owned businesses but not hot dogs, we aren’t talking about a medical problem but rather a social one.

Ever since Asian immigration to the United States started in the mid-nineteenth century, white supremacist narratives have associated Asians with disease. The founder of the New York Tribune wrote that Chinese immigrants were “uncivilized, unclean, and filthy beyond all conception” (Time). In 1906, Santa Ana, CA burned down its own Chinatown over fears that one resident had leprosy (LA Times). Last year, a man attacked a Thai woman on a train, yelling “every disease ever has come from China” (CNN). Much American coverage of the initial COVID outbreak in Wuhan centered on the “bizarre and unusual” livestock for sale in the “unsanitary” Huanan Market (FAIR), the equivalent of a Western farmers’ market.

Asians have long been thought to be an invasive, unclean element bringing exotic diseases into the American heartland. This belief is an element in anti-Asian violence, in moral panics over MSG, and in the idea that it’s only white-owned restaurants who can sell the “clean” versions of Asian food (Gothamist). As natural diets and “clean” living gained popularity after the 1960s, it’s no surprise that an “allergy” to a scary-sounding chemical provided a convenient vehicle for a very old racist narrative.

But at a time when both Asian restaurants and Asian people in America, in general, are under attack, it’d be nice if some non-Asian Americans forgot what they “knew” about MSG.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

MSG critics largely cite one single study contesting its safety.
Ever since Asian immigration to the United States started in the mid-nineteenth century, white supremacist narratives have associated Asians with disease.
The “Chinese restaurant syndrome" terminology could easily be applied to unhealthy foods from other cultures, but is specifically reserved for Asian cuisine.

RELATED ISSUES

7/22/2020 | Don't Americanize other cultures.

10/13/2020 | Support Chinatown during COVID-19.

1/13/2021 | Honor Mahjong.

PLEDGE YOUR SUPPORT

Nicole Cardoza 4/5/21 Nicole Cardoza 4/5/21

Redistribute your stimulus.

On March 11th, President Biden signed the American Rescue Plan into law. Among its provisions was a $1400 stimulus which most of us have already received. This check was only the third direct federal payment to Americans since the beginning of the pandemic. With four in ten households reporting lost wages due to COVID (CBS) and millions of tenants thousands of dollars behind in rent (Time), those $1400 came not a moment too soon.

Happy Monday everyone, and welcome back to the Anti-Racism Daily! A couple people asked how they could pay their stimulus forward to those that are unhoused, based on the action items in that newsletter from last week. I realized that, although I posted some options on Instagram, that we never outlined the inequities on the stimulus distribution in full. Andrew joins us today to walk through the details.

If you don't have the funds to give right now, or if you're in need, bookmark the resources provided below. Redistributing capital – either by taking or receiving – is powerful not just now, but any day throughout the year.

This newsletter is a free resource and that's made possible by our paying subscribers. Consider giving $7/month on Patreon. Or you can give one-time on our website or PayPal. You can also support us by joining our curated digital community. Thank you to all those that support!

Nicole

TAKE ACTION

Follow the Share My Check campaign (#ShareMyCheck).
Support immigrants by promoting or donating to the UndocuBlack Network COVID-19 Fund, the Immigrant Worker Safety Net Fund, or Movimiento Cosecha.
Contribute to or promote Mutual Aid for People Impacted by Incarceration, the Incarcerated Trans & Gender Diverse Community Fund, the Emergency Prisoner & Family Relief Fund, or a local community bail fund to support incarcerated people who may not receive stimulus checks.
Use these steps to help the unhoused in your community get their stimulus checks.
Learn more about undocumented people creating mutual aid initiatives for community survival.

GET EDUCATED

By Andrew Lee (he/him)

For many, the sense of relief was palpable. Others found their feelings tinged with bitterness because Biden had declared in January that $2000, not $1400, stimulus checks were coming (CBS). After months of isolation and economic crisis, however, something was certainly better than nothing.

It’s important to remember here that nothing is precisely what millions of people living in the United States received. Though the $1400 stimulus payments were widely distributed, they were not universal. And those who missed out were those with the least resources and social power to begin with.

Only citizens or legal residents were eligible for the stimulus check. International students and teachers on J or Q visas did not qualify for the $1400 payment. Nonresident aliens who file taxes with an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number instead of a Social Security number did not qualify either (Forbes). Every undocumented immigrant working in this country missed out on the stimulus check, as well (Huffington Post). Though Biden campaigned on a promise to “welcome immigrants in our communities,” his American Rescue Plan consciously blocks millions of immigrants from receiving economic relief in a time of unprecedented hardship (Biden Harris).

Incarcerated people were technically eligible to receive the third stimulus check (CBS). But they faced a number of obstacles in actually receiving their rightful stimulus money. First, they had to acquire the forms to apply for the stimulus, which was impossible for inmates such as those in solitary confinement. In other cases, forms mailed to incarcerated people were seized by prison staff (Marshall Project). Finally, some people received stimulus payments – only to have part of the funds withheld by the prison in which they are incarcerated as supposed “payment” for imprisoning them. The United States has just 5% of the world’s population but locks up nearly 25% of its incarcerated people (ACLU). Many of them are effectively blocked from receiving their full stimulus check.

Even for unincarcerated people with Social Security numbers who ought to be receiving checks, not all stimulus payments are created equal. Weeks, after other people received their money, Social Security and Veterans Affairs benefit recipients were still waiting (Newsweek). And in a country where the average person is tens of thousands of dollars in debt, people with unpaid medical or credit card bills could have their stimulus checks garnished by debt collectors (CNBC).

The wide disparities among stimulus eligibility reflect deep divisions in American society. There are somewhere between 10.5 and 12 million undocumented people in the United States (Brookings) and 2.3 million people in prison (Prison Policy Initiative). Some undocumented people are not adults. Some people in prison may receive their full stimulus despite the hurdles place in their way, and it’s hard to say how many nonresident visa holders may have left the country in recent months. However, given these numbers, it’s not absurd to think that there might be 8 or 9 million people in this country who miss out on the stimulus payment purely because of their immigration status or incarceration. That’s roughly the population of New York City.

If each and every New Yorker missed out on a $1400 check the government sent to everyone else, we would all recognize the injustice of the situation. Incarcerated people and immigrants do not experience the pandemic and recession less than anyone else. On the contrary, prisons and jails are hotbeds for COVID-19 (CNN), and immigrants are more likely to be exposed to infection as essential workers (fwd.us).

Many Americans who received the stimulus check used it to pay outstanding debts or buy household necessities. About 19% were able to put most of it in savings (CNBC). Others looked into how they might invest their stimulus in stocks or financial instruments to reap future profit (The Motley Fool).

If you were one of the stimulus recipients with enough financial security to use it for savings or investment, consider donating that money in whole or in part to people who received no stimulus at all. By practicing mutual aid and demanding more for oppressed communities, we can not just fight against the inequities that have emerged with COVID but also work to create a society better than the one we had before the pandemic.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Millions of people in America missed out on their stimulus checks.
Though eligible, incarcerated people face severe obstacles to actually receiving their money.
Undocumented immigrants and many visa holders received nothing.
Those who missed out on stimulus checks included groups with some of the least social power and wealth to begin with.
Instead of saving or investing, people with resources who don’t need their stimulus checks can instead redistribute their money to those who received nothing.

RELATED ISSUES

11/9/2020 | Seek solidarity, not charity.

9/30/2020 | Close the racial wealth gap.

2/22/2021 | Advocate for reparations.

PLEDGE YOUR SUPPORT

Nicole Cardoza 3/2/21 Nicole Cardoza 3/2/21

Demand more than reform.

The murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor this past summer sparked militant uprisings and massive protests nationwide. Combined with the ongoing pandemic and recession, the upheavals sparked tension and frayed nerves as the National Guard roamed American streets and police stations burned. None of this was helped by Trump’s hostility towards protestors, leaving many to look towards the incoming administration for a breath of fresh air.

We once again have a Democrat in the White House, one who has said we must “root out systemic racism across our laws and institutions” (USA Today). Biden is proposing $300 million for “community policing”: buying body cameras, diversifying and retraining police departments. Reform seems to be coming. You might think all is well.

Happy Tuesday and welcome back to the Anti-Racism Daily! Cities across the U.S. have pledged to hold local law enforcement accountable for the racial disparities in policing. But are efforts of reform sufficient to create comprehensive change? Andrew joins us today to emphasize the importance of advocating for abolition, in time for the launch of defundpolice.org, a comprehensive platform with education and action items for those that want to drive this work home in their communities.

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Nicole

TAKE ACTION

Visit DefundPolice.org, a new, comprehensive web resource where organizers can find everything they need for their campaign to defund police in one place.
Read “How I Became a Police Abolitionist” by Derecka Purnell to learn how someone who grew up calling the police decided that they never should have existed.
Support police and prison abolitionist groups like Critical Resistance (@C_Resistance), Survived and Punished (@survivepunish), the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (@IWW_IWOC), Study Abolition, and Jailhouse Lawyers Speak (@JailLawSpeak).
Donate to the National Bail Fund Network to free those behind bars solely because of a lack of financial resources.
Read about the white supremacist origins of policing and consider the role one’s privilege might play in opposing abolition.

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By Andrew Lee (he/him)

The problem is that depending on reforms is dangerous. First of all, it takes power away from protestors and communities and puts it in the hands of detached politicians. If politicians had the inclination and competence to fix unjust systems of their own accord, they presumably would have done so long ago.

The second problem is that community policing is just the last in a list of “silver bullets” supposed to truly end police brutality. First, it was civilian review boards (Minneapolis Star Tribune). Then, dashboard cameras (CNN). Now we’re told sensitivity training and body cameras are the missing piece. But if we look at the history, we find reason to be skeptical of these quick fixes.

A number of major American cities now have some form of police review board where citizens submit complaints about police misconduct. New York City implemented civilian oversight in the mid-1960s (Civilian Complaint Review Board) after the police murder of a Black teenager sparked the Harlem race riot (Britannica). A few years after a massive uprising following the assassination of Dr. King, Chicago started a police review board as well (Better Government Association). For many, it stood to reason that police misconduct would cease with civilian oversight.

Similarly, increasing attention to racism in law enforcement in the 1990s caused a number of states to mandate that police have in-car cameras (“dash cams”) to record traffic stops (Department of Justice). Surely if every police stop were recorded, the thinking went, racial bias in law enforcement would end.

And in the wake of the murder of Mike Brown and the Ferguson uprising, civil rights advocates joined with politicians (including President Obama) to support body-worn cameras for police (The Guardian). How could police racism ever persist, advocates declared, with video evidence of each and every encounter?

We now know that each of these silver bullets failed repeatedly in the most abysmal, tragic ways. A police review board didn’t stop Officer Jason Van Dyke from murdering teenager Laquan McDonald (New York Times). Officer Derek Chauvin’s body camera didn’t give him second thought as he knelt on George Floyd’s neck for eight long minutes (ABC News). And the Louisville Metro Police Department’s body cams didn’t stop them from executing Breonna Taylor in her own home (VICE News).

This should be no surprise: studies have found review boards (PBS) are often woefully unprepared to actually investigate police and a study commissioned by Washington, DC found that body-worn cameras actually have no measurable impact on police use of force (The Lab @ DC). We’ve seen cops get all of the shiny new tools they keep promising will finally bring accountability and justice, and we’ve seen nothing change. There has been so little improvement in American policing as a result that two panels looking at Chicago police misconduct found virtually the same problems some 43 years apart (Chicago Reader).

All of these much-lauded police reforms have actual effects—but not the ones advocates hope for. The announcement of reforms can pacify protests following highly-publicized police misconduct. And those dashboard-mounted and body-worn cameras for cops? Police departments were already interested in those, not for the purpose of protecting civil rights, but rather to help police evidence collection (Department of Justice). Nine out of ten state prosecutors’ offices who use body-worn camera footage as evidence in court use it to prosecute not the police but rather the civilians being filmed (Body-Worn Camera Training & Technical Assistance).

These reforms not only do not work, but they also increase the scale and the funding of policing. What abolitionist organizations like Critical Resistance identify is that the problem isn’t that the right tweaks haven’t been made, or the correct diversity seminar hasn’t been presented. The problem, in a deeply unequal and white supremacist society, is policing itself. Instead of directing more resources towards police departments, whether in the guise of reform or not, we should move resources away from them and into oppressed communities. For more on the difference between reform and abolition, check out our previous newsletter.

As an East Asian man with a college degree and housing, I don’t face the brunt of police brutality in my day-to-day life. But I’ve seen them unleash incredible amounts of violence at political demonstrations, and I’ve heard real horror stories from people in my life. It’s relatively painless for allies to support easy fixes to police brutality. Imagining a world without policing and its flip side, incarceration, can be scary for the privileged since police and prisons function in many ways to protect that very same privilege.

But if we want to be true allies for racial justice and collective liberation, we don’t have the luxury of taking the easy way out. We can’t be satisfied with simplistic reforms, especially ones that not only fail to limit police abuses but actually increase police power.

Removing resources from the police to build the kind of fully-resourced, safe and thriving communities that make policing obsolete won’t be easy. But at a time of inspiring mass mobilizations and incredible political danger, we need to look honestly at what decades of much-lauded reforms have actually done and what they haven’t. It’s time to demand more than reform.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Police reform has been tried before. There is compelling evidence that a variety of reforms do not reduce police misconduct.
In fact, reforms can actually strengthen law enforcement’s power by increasing surveillance or diffusing anger at police abuses.
We should directly redistribute resources currently invested in law enforcement to under-resourced communities.

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Nicole Cardoza 12/9/20 Nicole Cardoza 12/9/20

Rethink transracial adoption.

Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Amy Coney Barrett publicized her large family, including two Haitian adoptees. In response, Dr. Ibram X. Kendi wrote that historically, white families used adoption to “civilize” “savage” Black children. “And whether this is Barrett or not,” he tweeted, there is “a belief that too many White people have: if they have or adopt a child of color, then they can’t be racist.” Conservatives were outraged at the “attack” on Barrett’s children, arguing that no one who invited children of color into her home could be racist (Newsweek).

Good morning (or afternoon or evening) and welcome back to the Anti-Racism Daily. Today we're honored to have Andrew here to share his perspective on transracial adoption. This came up in questions when we wrote about Amy Coney Barrett back in October (see related issues section for context) and I'm glad we have a voice to share more with us today. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

Thank you for your generous support! Because of you, we can offer this newsletter free of charge and also pay our staff of writers and editors. Join in by making a one-time gift on ourwebsiteorPayPal, orsubscribe for $7/monthon Patreon. You can also Venmo (@nicoleacardoza). To subscribe, go toantiracismdaily.com.

Nicole

TAKE ACTION

Support the Adoptee Citizenship Act to ensure no internationally adopted person fails to receive US citizenship.
Follow Nodutdol, Raha Feminist Collective, About Face, and Code Pink to learn how to oppose US military intervention and exploitative practices that create orphans for the adoption system.
Help transracial adoptees build multiracial communities by reaching out across racial or cultural lines.
Recognize that white Americans benefit from military and economic practices that create adoptees. Follow @ROAR_Magazine, @inthesetimesmag, and @democracynow to learn more.

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By Andrew Lee (he/him)

But this isn’t just about one judge. While this summer’s protests brought racial injustice into the consciousness of many white people, some of them still believe that transracially adopting (that is, adopting across racial lines) a non-white child is the ultimate act of allyship.

This issue is personal for me because I’m a Korean person adopted into a largely white family. I think it’s important to question the idea that international, transracial adoption is a pure act of white allyship. This isn’t because I wish I stayed in an orphanage, or because I’m against multiracial families, or because I think that people who can’t or don’t want to have biological children should be prohibited from raising kids. However, like many other transracially, internationally adopted people, I’ve realized that there’s a lot more at stake in these adoptions than we first think.

About 200,000 Korean children like me have been adopted by families in the United States (NBC News). Scores of adoptees come from countries like Guatemala, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Thailand (Considering Adoption). The narrative is that our birth families don’t want us, so their adoptive parents do us a service by taking us in. In this story, birth families and countries are irresponsible, while adoptive families and the United States are charitable humanitarians.

There are a few problems with this. First, international adoption has been loosely regulated. In some countries, parents place their children in an orphanage temporarily when they can’t make ends meet, later returning to reclaim them (CNN, Firstpost). Some have found their child has been adopted to a different country in their absence. In other cases, adoptive parents fail to correctly register their kids for US citizenship (The Intercept). Their children find out years later that they’re actually undocumented immigrants subject to deportation to countries don’t remember (NBC News). The demand for adoptees is so strong that the welfare of actual adoptees can be an afterthought.

The second problem with the humanitarian view of adoption is that countries that send children to the United States are often poor as a result of the American government’s actions.

There’s a reason Americans don’t get adoptees from France or England. While South Korea isn’t a poor country today, adoption from the country started right after the Korean War, when it was one of the poorest (Brookings). During the war, American forces deforested nearly the entire peninsula with napalm (Truthout). Some women survived by having sexual relations with American occupying forces. Their mixed-race children were the first Korean American adoptees (USA Today).

Afterwards, adoption of full-blooded Korean children like me followed, as efforts to economically outcompete the communist North came at the expense of setting up a welfare system for single mothers (The Korea Herald). Adoption from South Korea, wrote adoptee Maija E. Brown, created “a paternal attitude between Korea and the US where white Americans rescued Asian orphans, while concealing the US responsibility in the Korean War” (University of Minnesota). In the words of Ju-Jyun Park, adoption from South Korea is one of the ways in which “the war lives on as a material fact” (The New Inquiry).

The Democratic Republic of the Congo, another source of adoptees, has seen autocracy and war since the United States helped overthrow democratically elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in the 1960s (Guardian). Today, conflict is driven by the reserves of valuable metals like coltan, essential to the production of computers and cellphones (Dissent). Just as in Korea, US policies created the conditions to ensure vulnerable children couldn’t be supported by society, and then swept in as these children’s “savior.”

Even domestic transracial adoptions have problematic aspects. How else could you describe a system that literally offers Black children at a “discount” rate compared to white children (NPR)? (For more on the complications that can arise with the domestic adoption industry, check out this report and this article.)

This is why a color-blind savior attitude towards adoption just doesn’t cut it. If you transracially adopt a child, recognize that systemic racism doesn’t disappear because you “don’t see race.” That child will need a multiracial community to provide the resources and resiliency to survive in a white supremacist society, skills that no white parents will be able to provide, no matter how good their intentions.

In the words of transracial Korean adoptee Jenn Hardin, racial justice means we have to “explore the dark history of Korean adoption, the parts that don’t fit the ‘save the orphans’ narrative that so many refer to because it’s all they know” (Medium). We should question the transfer of resources and children from poor countries to rich ones. We should rethink a system that deprives poor women of color in poor countries of the social support and reproductive care that would stop their countries’ orphanages from filling up with potential adoptees.

It’s time to rethink transracial adoption.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

About 200,000 Korean children have been adopted by families in the United States (NBC News). Adoption from the country started right after the Korean War.
The countries that send children to the United States are often poor as a result of US military and government actions. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, US policies created the conditions to ensure vulnerable children couldn’t be supported by society, and then swept in as these children’s “savior.”
A color-blind savior attitude towards adoption is not allyship. Systemic racism doesn’t disappear because you “don’t see race.” Transracially adopted children need a multiracial community to provide the resources and resiliency to survive in a white supremacist society, skills that white parents cannot provide, no matter how good their intentions.

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